OC Blog

Greenhut On Loretta Lunacy

Steve Greenhut posts about Loretta over at Orange Punch:

Americans are used to complaining about their do-nothing Congress, but doing nothing is better than doing what Rep. Loretta Sanchez achieved this week: doing bad, expensive, counterproductive things.

After linking to some of our posts, Steve continues:

Isn't it time for Van Tran to start planning to run for this seat? It's time to have someone rational representing this district (no, Bob Dornan wasn't rational either).

Amen, brother.

The Man Behind Red County

Ever since OC Blog became part of Red County and the magazine began publishing (the third issue arrived in mail boxes last week), I'm sure readers have wondered exactly who is behind the growing Red County media enterprise.

Although there are a number of shareholders in this undertaking, the driving force behind it it Tracy Price, former president of the Lincoln Club of Orange County and Chief Executive of Linc Group LLC.

The Orange County Business Journal published an article on Tracy and his company in the current issue, so I thought I'd share it with our readers to give them a better sense of the individual who's vision gives form and substance to Red County.

Irvine’s Linc Breaks Last Enron Link

SERVICES: HQ moves to Irvine from Houston; $475M in sales

By Sarah Tolkoff
Orange County Business Journal Staff

Linc Group LLC of Irvine has closed a chapter in a history that’s been “stranger than fiction,” in the words of Chief Executive Tracy Price.

Some Home-Grown Satire Of The Disney/Anaheim Situation

Readers who don't regularly visit OCLegend.com, ought to do so. After all, it is the consistently funniest destination in the OC blogosphere -- or any OC media, for that matter. It says so right there on the OCLegend.com masthead.

In March they published this very funny satire of Disney's lawsuit against Anaheim:

Theme Park Sues Theme Park City
Theme disputed

ANAHEIM -- Lawyers for a popular Anaheim theme park are taking the city to court for what they claim is a lack of "municipal imagination." City attorneys refused to comment on the case, other than to say, "It's clear that these guys hit their head after falling from the tram." 

Steve Greenhut Leaving The GOP

I see from his Orange Punch post that Steve Greenhut is planning to leave the Republican Party, and will give his reasons in his Sunday column.

I'm sad to see Steve go, respect his decision and share his dissatisfaction with the state of the GOP. At the national level, our party leaders squandered six years of control of the federal government by making a mockery of our claim to be the party of small government. I'll refrain from further comment on  Steve's decision it until reading his column, other than to note there are essentially two responses one can make when one's political party drifts from its philosophical moorings: abandon ship, or stay and fight to steer it back to its proper, principled course.

That was a choice facing Republicans back in the 1970s following nearly six years of Nixonism (detente, wage-and-price controls, an explosion of the federal regulatory state, etc.). Fortunately, conservatives like Ronald Reagan chose to stand and fight rather than abandon ship.

OC Register Website Lameness...Continued

Yesterday and last week I posted about the OC Register website and its disturbing tendency to bury or completely omit news stories that are prominently featured in its front and Local sections.

The saga continues today. The top-of-the-fold story in today's Local section is "Express Lanes Get Costlier," and yet it is omitted from the OC Register website -- or at least my very determined exploratory effort failed to unearth it.

Resistance Is Futile

Although this is a Red County, it has a definite Blue streak. So why persuade and engage the other side when you can just absorb them?

The good people at TheLiberalOC.com reached a similar conclusion: why not indeed?

Red County/OC Blog Wins Its First Award

Mrs. Jubal and I hosted our 2nd Annual "St. Paddy's Day...South of the Border" party this past March 17, and Orange County Employees Association General Manager Nick Berardino was among our guests.

Nick and I obviously don't see eye-to-eye on a number of issues, but I like and respect Nick very much. He fights hard for what he believes, but doesn't make it personal.

In any case, at the party Nick presented me with this, the OCEA "Blemmy" (short for "blog Emmy") for our coverage of the 1st Supervisor District special election:

 

I think it is a wonderful irony that center-right Red County/OC Blog's very first blog award should come from a government employee union.

Thank you, Nick! And also thanks tot he rest of the Blogpen, to whom this award belongs, including Quang Pham and especially Mark Leyes. Without Mark's reporting, commenting and analysis, our coverage of the special election wouldn't have been nearly as good or complete.

CUSD Recall Committee Unveils New Website & Blog

This came over the transom yesterday from the CUSD Recall Committee:

CUSD Recall Committee Unveils New Website and Blog (www.cusdrecall.com)

This content-rich website will be a principal information resource where concerned parents, teachers, taxpayers and elected officials can regularly check in for news, updates and provocative discussion relating to the ongoing campaign to reform the Capistrano Unified School District.

The site focuses on reform issues and will feature easy access to news, blogs, documentation and other information, and a variety of features, including:

Academic Finger-Wagging At Vietnamese Voters

TheLiberalOC.com posted an interesting guest blogger column by two retired academics, Ralph E. Shaffer & Walter P. Coombs (although the use of the personal pronoun "I" in the article would indicate only one of the two gentlemen wrote the piece but share attribution -- sort of a Lennon & McCartney thing).

Shaffer  and Coombs hook onto the recent (and unfinished) 1st Supervisor District special election and lend their voices to the Vietnamese-are-anti-Latino chorus that has come into being in the wake of the Nguyen-Nguyen triumph. It's basically a collection of canards and ivory tower liberalism.

Take this passage for example:

New Additions To The OC Blogosphere

There a couple of new additions to the OC blogosphere.

First there's Rep. John Campbell's new Green Eye Shade Blog. OK, so it's not OC-specific in its content, but John Campbell is one of our so it counts that way.

As Campbell puts it:

But this blog is not for fashion conscious bean counters. It is for anyone who thinks that federal taxes and spending are too high, the federal government is too big and the deficit needs to go away.